[footnote: now i would much rather listen to the mire-of-morose bands of that era - Alice of Chains above all, but probably Kyuss and possibly even Wool whoever the fuck they were - than any of them lo-fi record-clerk collector/zine-ed type bands]

Sunday, May 7, 2017

[written for somebody as part of an interview i did, bonus side-bar thing or something, can't remember who, can't remember when - the concept was "three music books you love that aren't that well known or are forgotten"Starlust (1985)
by Fred and Judy Vermorel has been out of print for years, but is just about to
get reissued by my publisher as part of its Faber Finds imprint. Here’s how I
blurbed it: “This fascinating and groundbreaking expose . . . lifts the lid on
fan culture to reveal—and revel in—its literally idolatrous delirium. Yet, far
from manipulated dupes of a cynical record industry, fans are shown to be
subversive fantasists who use the objects of their worship as a means to access
the bliss and glory they cannot find in their everyday lives and social
surroundings. A lost classic of pop-culture critique that’s woven almost
entirely out of the testimonials and confessions of the fans themselves, Starlust is
above all a celebration of the power of human imagination.”

Big Noises (1991) is a really enjoyable book about
guitarists by the novelist Geoff Nicholson. It consists of 36 short
“appreciations” of axemen (and they’re all men; indeed, it’s quite a male book
but quite unembarrassed about that). These range from obvious greats/grates
like Clapton/Beck/Page/Knopfler to quirkier choices like Adrian Belew, Henry
Kaiser, and Derek Bailey. Nicholson writes in a breezy, deceptively
down-to-earth style that nonetheless packs in a goodly number of penetrating
insights. I just dug this out of my storage unit in London a couple of months
ago and have been really enjoying dipping into it.

The Boy Looked At Johnny (1978) by Julie
Burchill and Tony Parsons is a curious thing: proof that a music book can be
almost entirely wrong and yet remain a bona fide rockwrite classic. Allegedly
written in a few days during an amphetamine bender, it’s subtitled “The
Obituary of Rock and Roll,” but is really a requiem for the then-married
authors’ broken-hearted belief in punk-as-revolution. Bitter and bitchy,
strident and stylish, it had a huge impact on me at the time, as it did on
loads of other impressionable youths; I was surprised to find out later that
many people at the time of its release disapproved/deplored/dismissed it
altogether. A big deal at the time, The Boy Looked At Johnny really
has been forgotten. Few today even remember that perennially infamous newspaper
opionator Burchill was once a music journalist—indeed, for a few years, the
U.K.’s most famous rock writer.

Monday, May 1, 2017

Standing on a subway platform waiting for the L train to
Brooklyn recently, I saw a group of young men with that slightly scruffy,
indeterminately hip look that screams "Williamsburg" and was struck
by the fact that all three of them had beards.
Later that same week, walking down a single block in the East Village, I
passed around a dozen men in the 18 to 35 age range who were bearded. A few days after that, watching New York
Noise, an alternative rock cable TV show,
I saw several videos in a row in which most members of the group sported
one form or other of facial fuzz, climaxing with Fleet Foxes's hairier-than-thou "He Doesn't Know Why".

It was then that it struck me that beardedness had gradually
become one of the crucial, era-defining signifiers for Noughties non-mainstream
rock.

That's particularly the case in the United States, where
whiskers have an obvious fit with alt-country and free folk. But things have
gotten pretty hirsute this past decade in the U.K. too. Take a look at this TV commercial, part of British Airways "face-to-face" campaign to
"promote entrepreneurship in tough times" and focusing in this case on the U.K. music industry. It's meant to be a sort of slideshow of today's
hot, hip 'n' happening Brit-rock scene.
But the panorama of long straggly hair, peasant skirts, acoustic guitars and beards
feels more like you've gone through a time tunnel to 1972. Until recently there
was even a Scottish music zine called Beard whose cover stars tended to be mutton-chopped minstrels such
as Alasdair Roberts and Robert Wyatt.

The
magazine's founders Stewart Smith and Neil Jacques developed "an
admiration for beards" at the start of this decade through listening to a ton
of Wyatt, Dennis Wilson, and Will Oldham.

Formerly of Palace Brothers and also known as Bonnie
'Prince' Billy, Oldham pioneered the new beardedness. He actually
looks like a pioneer, an early American homesteader or beaver-trapper. Just
check the sepia-toned photograph on the cover of his 2003 album Master and
Everyone, which has the old-timey aura of a Daguerrotype or Calotype portrait
circa the American Civil War. The bald dome only accentuates the dense thickets
of bristles engulfing the lower half of his head.

Sharing reference points like HarrySmith’s
1952 Anthology of American Folk Music and John Fahey, Oldham is a fellow-
traveler to the free folk scene, an entire region of U.S. underground music that's virtually Gilette-free. When it comes to untamed brush, Matt
Valentine of the duo MV & EE is something of a vanguard figure. He and his partner Erika Elder live out in
the woodlands near Brattleboro, Vermont, an area that's been a magnet for East
Coast bohemians since hippie days. For
glimpses of Valentine's magnificent bracken, check out this footage of MV &
EE performing with the Canada Goose Band (a combo who took their name from a brand
of rolling papers)

and also this short
interview where the duo discuss their political and spiritual beliefs

(note how Elder
describes the output of their record label Child Of Microtones
as a "harvest").

Valentine is sniffy about the more "commercial"
end of freak folk (performers like Joanna Newsom, who spiritually at least is a
bearded lady) for being too sonically groomed. But there's no deny that
Devendra Banhard has contributed
massively to setting back the cause of cleancut-ness this decade. Other notable
Noughties hairies who've put the willies up the Wilkinson shareholdership include
Bon Iver, Band of Bees, Destroyer's Daniel Bejar, Iron & Wine's Sam Beam,
Band of Horses, and Broken Social
Scene (roughly 80 percent of whose
sprawling line-up go unshaven, with most of the remainder being female). Strangely, Grizzly Bear favour the razor,
while Animal Collective is only one thirds furry.

"What about Wayne Coyne?" I hear you cry. True, he has one of the most pleasing countenances
in all of modern rock, a look that is somehow consonant with the Flaming Lips
sound. But I think Wayne's salt-and-pepper
beard has a slightly different inflection to the Noughties nu-folkies. It's evocative more of Laurel Canyon and
soft-rock Los Angeles circa 1976: Andrew
Gold, even Michael McDonald when he was in the Doobie Brothers. Typically
wearing a nice-looking jacket, Coyne seems urbane and contemporary, as opposed
to rustic and bygone.

As it happens, the
neatly-trimmed (and well-washed) Seventies soft rock style beard has been
cropping up in electronic music circles all through the decade, from one half of Air to Norwegian "space
disco" producer Lindstrom.

Earlier I suggested that face-fuzz had become an
epoch-defining signifier in left-field rock. But what does it actually
signify? Let's look again at Fleet Foxes's
"He Doesn't Know Why", where the group sound like angels but look
like satyrs.

Here beardedness becomes tantamount
to a visual rhetoric, a form of authentication, as though the band are wearing
their music on their faces. The video is
a symphony of brown hues; there's even livestock mingling with the band as they
play, goats whose tufty throats accentuate the band's bewhiskeredness. The promo's earthy colour-palette and the
group's straggly and somewhat greasy beards make for a blatant example of image
following the music's lead in echoing an era of rock history: 1968-1969, the
very first time that rock grew a beard.
On "He Doesn't Know Why", the sound and visuals are equal
parts Crosby Stills Nash & Young and The Band. With Fleet Foxes's debut album featuring
ditties about red squirrels and meadowlarks and song titles like "Ragged
Wood" and "Blue Ridge Mountains," it hardly takes Roland Barthes
to decode the beards as the physiognomic expression of that perennial American
yearning for wilderness (a longing
seemingly felt most fiercely by young Americans who didn't grow up anywhere
near remote rural areas). In this
symbolic scheme, facial fur = fir (and pine, spruce, maple, et al), while Gillete = the timber industry, or "mountaintop removal" mining.

In a silent but
eloquent protest against modernity, Fleet Foxes have turned their chins into
miniature Appalachian forests.

Blissblog follow-up post on changing attitudes to facial hair and cycles of fashion / grooming through rock history

It wasn't like that in my day, let me tell you. Beards, in
the postpunk late Seventies and early Eighties, weren't admirable, they were
aberrant. Postpunk's angst squad were
pallid and wintry, the New Pop outfits like Orange Juice were fresh-faced and
boyish.

If you saw a furry face in the NME it would be either a roots reggae
band (the semiotics of beards have a completely different valence in black
music in general) or it'd be someone like John Martyn or Richard Thompson, i.e.
a throwback to another era, folk-rock.
Beards strangely doubled as signifiers of hippiedom and authority (they
were what policemen had--just check the cover of David Peace's GB84 with its
throng of coppers holding back a mass picket).

At my college the only beard-wearers were a bunch of hippies, the same
age as me but utterly dedicated to living in 1968 (they listened to The
Hangman's Incredible Daughter). Apart
from these strident anachronists, the only other occurrences of facial hair were rare and fell into
particular categories. It could be a guy
who was short and slight and therefore sick of being offered half-price on
public transport. It could be the
expression of radical self-neglect (often accompanied by body-odour or
scurvy). It could be the sign of an
evangelical Christian (the beard expressing both Jesus-identification and a
lack of vanity). Finally, the stereotype went, a beard was the insignia of the
geology student.

By the late Eighties and on into the Nineties, beards
started to become hip. You had the vaguely-Satanic,
"R-U-ready-to-rock?" beard, as worn ironically by Zodiac Mindwarp and
then in deadly earnest by Dave Navarro of Jane's Addiction and Chris Cornell of
Soundgarden. There were soul-patches and
goatees and what you might call the "hemp beard" (Cypress Hill).

There was weirdy-beardy electronica (Richard D. James, Luke Vibert).

Somewhere in the middle of this you also got
the I-am-above-such-trifling-things-as-image beard,e.g. the brambles that over-ran the face of Elvis
Costello circa 1990, seemingly an act of pique at the fact that he wasn't
getting hits anymore.

(Paddy MacAloon's
current image might be a variant of this kind of ex-popstar beard).

Facial hair of ever-increasingly complexity
became a staple of metal both on the underground (thrash, black, doom, etc) and
mainstream (nu-metal) , perhaps signifying the resurgence of "real"
metal bringing to an end the Eighties hair metal era (when pretty-boy rockers's
faces were as smooth as their long locks were silky).